Margaret O’Brien, a great-aunt and seventy-five, knew she was near the
end. She did not repine, for she had had a long, hard life and she was
tired. The young priest who brought her communion had administered the
last rites--holy oils on her eyelids (Lord, forgive her the sins of
seeing!); holy oils on her lips (Lord, forgive her the sins of
speaking!), on her ears, on her knotted hands, on her weary feet. Now
she was ready, though she knew the approach of the dread presence would
mean greater suffering. So she folded quiet hands beneath her heart,
there where no child had ever lain, yet where now something grew and
fattened on her strength. And she seemed given over to pleasant revery.
Neighbors came in to see her, and she roused herself and received them
graciously, with a personal touch for each.--“And has your Julia gone to
New York, Mrs. Carty? Nothing would do her but she must be going, I
suppose. ’Twas the selfsame way with me, when I was coming out here from
the old country. Full of money the streets were, I used to be thinking.
Well, well; the hills far away are green.”
Or to Mrs. Devlin: “Terence is at it again, I see by the look of you.
Poor man! There’s no holding him? Eh, woman dear! Thirst is the end of
drinking and sorrow is the end of love.”
If her visitors stayed longer than a few minutes, however, her
attention wandered; her replies became cryptic. She would murmur
something about “all the seven parishes,” or the Wicklow hills, or “the
fair cove of Cork tippytoe into the ocean;” then fall into silence,
smiling, eyes closed, yet with a singular look of attention. At such
times her callers would whisper: “Glory b’t’ God! she’s so near it
there’s no fun in it,” and slip out soberly into the kitchen.
Her niece, Anna Lennan, mother of a fine brood of children, would stop
work for the space of a breath and enjoy a bit of conversation.
“Ain’t she failing, though, the poor afflicted creature?” Mrs. Hanley
cried one day. “Her mind is going back on her already.”
“Are you of that opinion? I’m thinking she’s mind enough yet, when she
wants to attend; but mostly she’s just drawn into herself, as busy as a
bee about something, whatever it is that she’s turning over in her head
day-in, day-out. She sleeps scarce a wink for all she lies there so
quiet, and, in the night, my man and I hear her talking to herself. ‘No,
no,’ she’ll say. ‘I’ve gone past. I must be getting back to the start.’
Or, another time, ‘This is it, now. If I could be stopping!’”
“And what do you think she is colloguing about?”
“There’s no telling. Himself does be saying it’s in an elevator she is,
but that’s because he puts in the day churning up and down in one of the
same. What else can you expect? ’Tis nothing but ‘Going up! going down!’
with him all night as it is. Betune the two of them they have me fair
destroyed with their traveling. ‘Are you lacking anything, Aunt
Margaret?’ I call out to her. ‘I am not,’ she answers, impatient-like.
‘Don’t be ever fussing and too-ing, will you?’”
“Tch! tch!”
“And do you suppose the children are a comfort to her? Sorra bit. Just a
look at them and she wants to be alone. ‘Take them away, let you,’ says
she, shutting her eyes. ‘The others is realer.’”
“And you think she’s in her right mind all the same?”
“I do. ’Tis just something she likes to be thinking over,--something
she’s fair dotty about. Why, it’s the same when Father Flint is here.
Polite and riverintial at the first, then impatient, and, if the poor
man doesn’t be taking the hint, she just closes up shop and off again
into her whimsies. You’d swear she was in fear of missing something.”
The visitor, being a young wife, had an explanation to hazard. “If she
was a widow woman, now, or married--perhaps she had a liking for
somebody once. Perhaps she might be trying to imagine them young days
over again. Do you think could it be that?”
Anna shook her head. “My mother used to say she was a born old maid. All
_she_ wanted was work and saving her bit of money, and to church every
minute she could be sparing.”
“Still, you can’t be telling. ’Tis often that kind weeps sorest when
’tis too late. My own old aunt used to cry, ‘If I could be twenty-five
again, wouldn’t I do different!’”
“Maybe, maybe, though I doubt could it be so.”
Nor was it so. The old woman, lying back so quietly among her pillows
with closed eyes, yet with that look of singular intentness and
concentration, was seeking no lover of her youth; though, indeed, she
had had one once, and from time to time he did enter her revery, try as
she would to prevent him. At that point, she always made the singular
comment, “Gone past! I must be getting back to the beginning,” and,
pressing back into her earliest consciousness, she would remount the
flooding current of the years. Each time, she hoped to get
further,--though remoter shapes were illusive, and, if approached too
closely, vanished,--for, once embarked on her river of memories, the
descent was relentlessly swift. How tantalizing that swiftness! However
she yearned to linger, she was rushed along till, all too soon, she
sailed into the common light of day. At that point, she always put
about, and laboriously recommenced the ascent.
To-day, something her niece had said about Donnybrook Fair--for Anna,
too, was a child of the old sod--seemed to swell out with a fair wind
the sails of her visionary bark. She closed her mind to all familiar
shapes and strained back--way, way back, concentrating all her powers in
an effort of will. For a bit she seemed to hover in populous space. This
did not disturb her; she had experienced the same thing before. It
simply meant she had mounted pretty well up to the fountainhead. The
figures, when they did come, would be the ones she most desired.
At last, they began to take shape, tenuously at first, then of fuller
body, each bringing its own setting, its own atmospheric
suggestion--whether of dove-feathered Irish cloud and fresh greensward,
of sudden downpour, or equally sudden clearing, with continual leafy
drip, drip, drip, in the midst of brilliant sunshine.
For Margaret O’Brien, ardent summer sunlight seemed suddenly to pervade
the cool, orderly little bedchamber. Then, “Here she is!” and a wee girl
of four danced into view, wearing a dress of pink print, very tight at
the top and very full at the bottom. She led the way to a tiny new house
whence issued the cheery voice of hammers. Lumber and tools were lying
round; from within came men’s voices. The small girl stamped up the
steps and looked in. Then she made for the narrow stair.
“Where’s Margaret gone to?” said one of the men. “The upper floor’s not
finished. It’s falling through the young one will be.”
“Peggy!” called the older man. “Come down here with you.”
There was a delighted squeal. The pink dress appeared at the head of the
stairs. “Oh, the funny little man, daddy! Such a funny little old man
with a high hat! Come quick, let you, and see him.”
The two men ran to the stairs.
“Where is he?”
She turned back and pointed. Then her face fell. “Gone! the little man
is gone!”
Her father laughed and picked her up in his arms. “How big was he, Peg?
As big as yourself, I wonder?”
“No, no! Small.”
“As big as the baby?”
She considered a moment. “Yes, just as big as that. But a man, da.”
“Well, why aren’t you after catching him and holding him for ransom?
’Tis pots and pots o’ gold they’ve hidden away, the little people, and
will be paying a body what he asks to let them go.”
She pouted, on the verge of tears. “I want him to come back.”
“I mistrust he won’t be doing that, the leprechaun. Once you take your
eye away, it’s off with him for good and all.”
Margaret O’Brien hugged herself with delight. _That_ was a new one; she
had never got back that far before. Yet how well she remembered it all!
She seemed to smell the woody pungency of the lumber, the limy odor of
whitewash from the field-stone cellar.
The old woman’s dream went on. Out of the inexhaustible storehouse of
the past, she summoned, one by one, her much-loved memories. There was a
pigtailed Margaret in bonnet and shawl, trudging to school one wintry
day. She had seen many wintry school-days, but this one stood out by
reason of the tears she had shed by the way. She saw the long benches,
the slates, the charts, the tall teacher at his desk. With a swelling of
the throat, she saw the little girl sob out her declaration: “I’m not
for coming no more, Mr. Wilde.”
“What’s that, Margaret? And why not? Haven’t I been good to you?”
Tears choked the child. “Oh, Mr. Wilde, it’s just because you’re so
terrible good to me. They say you are trying to make a Protestant out
of me. So I’ll not be coming no more.”
The tall man drew the little girl to his knee and reassured her.
Margaret O’Brien could review that scene with tender delight now. She
had not been forced to give up her beloved school. Mr. Wilde had
explained to her that her brothers were merely teasing her because she
was so quick and such a favorite.
A little Margaret knelt on the cold stone floor at church and stared at
the pictured saints or heard the budding branches rustle in the orchard
outside. Another Margaret, a little taller, begged for a new sheet of
ballads every time her father went to the fair.--There were the long
flimsy sheets, with closely printed verses. These you must adapt to
familiar tunes. This Margaret, then, swept the hearth and stacked the
turf and sang from her bench in the chimney-corner. Sometimes it was
something about “the little old red coat me father wore,” which was “All
buttons, buttons, buttons, buttons; all buttons down before”; or another
beginning “Oh, dear, what can the matter be? Johnny’s so long at the
fair! He promised to buy me a knot of blue ribbon to tie up my bonnie
brown hair.”
Then there was a picture of the time the fairies actually bewitched the
churn, and, labor as you might, no butter would form, not the least tiny
speck. Margaret and her mother took the churn apart and examined every
part of it. Nothing out of the way. “’Tis the fairies is in it,” her
mother said. “All Souls’ Day a-Friday. Put out a saucer of cream the
night for the little people, let you.” A well-grown girl in a blue
cotton frock, the long braids of her black hair whipping about her in
the windy evening, set out the cream on the stone flags before the low
doorway, wasting no time in getting in again. The next day, how the
butter “came!” Hardly started they were, when they could feel it
forming. When Margaret washed the dasher, she “kept an eye out” for the
dark corners of the room, for the air seemed thronged and murmurous.
After this picture, came always the same tall girl still in the same
blue frock, this time with a shawl on her head. She brought in potatoes
from the sheltered heaps that wintered out in the open. From one pailful
she picked out a little flat stone, rectangular and smoother and more
evenly proportioned than any stone she had ever seen.
“What a funny stone!” she said to her mother.
Her mother left carding her wool to look. “You may well say so. ’Tis one
of the fairies’ tables. Look close and you’ll be turning up their little
chairs as well.”
It was as her mother said. Margaret found four smaller stones of like
appearance, which one might well imagine to be stools for tiny dolls.
“Shall I be giving them to little Bee for playthings?”
“You will not. You’ll be putting them outside. In the morning, though
you may be searching the countryside, no trace of them will you find,
for the fairies will be taking them again.”
So Margaret stacked the fairy table and chairs outside. Next morning,
she ran out half reluctantly, for she was afraid she would find them and
that would spoil the story. But, no! they were gone. She never saw them
again, though she searched in all imaginable places. Nor was that the
last potato heap to yield these mysterious stones.
Margaret, growing from scene to scene, appeared again in a group of
laughing boys and girls.
“What’ll we play now?”
“Let’s write the ivy test.”
“Here’s leaves.”
Each wrote a name on a leaf and dropped it into a jar of water. Next
morning, Margaret, who had misgivings, stole down early and searched for
her leaf. Yes, the die was cast! At the sight of its bruised surface,
ready tears flooded her eyes. She had written the name of her little
grandmother, and the condition of the leaf foretold death within the
year. The other leaves were unmarred. She quickly destroyed the
ill-omened bit of ivy and said nothing about it, though the children
clamored. “There’s one leaf short. Whose is gone?” “Mine is there!” “Is
it yours, John?” “Is it yours, Esther?” But Margaret kept her counsel,
and, within the year, the little grandmother was dead. Of course, she
was old, though vigorous; yet Margaret would never play that game again.
It was like gambling with fate.
And still the girls kept swinging past. Steadily, all too swiftly,
Margaret shot up to a woman’s stature; her skirts crept down, her braids
ought to have been bobbed up behind. She let them hang, however, and
still ran with the boys, questing the bogs, climbing the apple trees,
storming the wind-swept hills. Her mother would point to her sister
Mary, who, though younger, sat now by the fire with her “spriggin’”
[embroidery] for “the quality.” Mary could crochet, too, and had a fine
range of “shamrogue” patterns. So the mother would chide Margaret.
“What kind of a girl are you, at all, to be ever lepping and tearing
like a redshanks [deer]? ’Tis high time for you to be getting sensible
and learning something. Whistles and scouting-guns is all you’re good
for, and there’s no silver in them things as far as I can see.”
What fine whistles she contrived out of the pithy willow shoots in the
spring! And the scouting-guns hollowed out of elder-stalks, which they
charged with water from the brook by means of wadded sticks, working
piston-wise! They would hide behind a hedge and bespatter enemies and
friends alike. Many’s the time they got their ears warmed in consequence
or went supperless to bed, pretending not to see the table spread with
baked potatoes,--“laughing potatoes,” they called them, because they
were ever splitting their sides,--besides delicious buttermilk, new-laid
eggs, oat-cakes and fresh butter. “A child without supper is two to
breakfast,” their mother would say, smiling, when she saw them “tackle”
their stirabout the next day.
How full of verve and life were all these figures! That glancing
creature grow old? How could such things be! The sober pace of maturity
even seemed out of her star. Yet here she was, growing up, for all her
reluctance. An awkward gossoon leaned over the gate in the moonlight,
though she was indoors, ready to hide. But nobody noticed her alarm.
“There’s that long-legged McMurray lad again; scouting after Mary, I’ll
be bound,” said her mother, all unawares.
But it was not Mary that he came for, though she married him just the
same, and came out to America with their children some years after her
sister’s lone pilgrimage.
The intrusion of Jerry McMurray signaled the grounding of her dream bark
on the shoals of reality. Who cared about the cut-and-dried life of a
grown woman? Enchantment now lay behind her, and, if the intervals
between periods of pain permitted, she again turned an expectant face
toward the old childish visions. Sometimes she could make the trip twice
over without being overtaken by suffering. But her intervals of comfort
grew steadily shorter; frequently she was interrupted before she could
get rightly launched on her delight. And always there seemed to be one
vision more illusive than the rest which she particularly longed to
recapture. At last, chance words of Anna’s put her on its trail in this
wise.
When she was not, as her niece said, “in her trance, wool-gathering,”
Anna did her best to distract her, sending the children in to ask “would
she have a sup of tea now,” or a taste of wine jelly. One day, after the
invalid had spent a bad night, she brought in her new long silk coat for
her aunt’s inspection, for the old woman had always been “tasty” and
“dressy,” and had made many a fine gown in her day. The sharp old eyes
lingered on the rich and truly striking braid ornament that secured the
loose front of the garment.
“What’s that plaster?” she demanded, disparagingly.
Anna, inclined to be wroth, retorted: “I suppose you’d be preferring one
o’ them tight ganzy [sweater] things that fit the figger like a jersey,
all buttoned down before.”
A sudden light flamed in the old face. “I have it!” she cried. “’Tis
what I’ve been seeking this good while. ’Twill come now--the red coat! I
must be getting back to the beginning.”
With that, she was off, relaxing and composing herself, as if
surrendering to the spell of a hypnotist.
To reach any desired picture in her gallery, she must start at the
outset. Then they followed on, in due order--all that procession of
little girls: pink clad, blue-print clad, bare-legged or brogan-shod;
flirting their short skirts, plaiting their heavy braids. About half way
along, a new figure asserted itself--a girl of nine or ten, who twisted
this way and that before a blurred bit of mirror and frowned at the red
coat that flapped about her heels,--bought oversize, you may be sure, so
that she shouldn’t grow out of it too soon. The sleeves swallowed her
little brown hands, the shoulders and back were grotesquely sack-like,
the front had a puss [pout] on it.
“’Tis the very fetch of Paddy the gander I am in it. I’ll not be wearing
it so.” She frowned with sudden intentness. “Could I be fitting it a
bit, I wonder, the way mother does cut down John’s coats for Martin?”
With needle, scissors and thread, she crept up to her little chamber
under the eaves. It was early in the fore-noon when she set to work
ripping. The morning passed, and the dinner hour.
“Peggy! Where’s the girl gone to, I wonder?”
“To Aunt Theresa’s, I’m thinking.”
“Well, it’s glad I am she’s out o’ my sight, for my hands itched to be
shaking her. Stand and twist herself inside out she did, fussing over
the fit of the good coat I’m after buying her. The little fustherer!”
For the small tailoress under the roof, the afternoon sped on winged
feet: pinning, basting, and stitching; trying on, ripping out again, and
re-fitting. “I’ll be taking it in a wee bit more.” She had to crowd up
to the window to catch the last of the daylight. At dusk, she swept her
dark hair from her flushed cheeks and forced her sturdy body into the
red coat. It was a “fit,” believe you me! Modeled on the lines of the
riding-habit of a full-figured lady she had seen hunting about the
countryside, it buttoned up tight over her flat, boyish chest and
bottled up her squarish little waist. About her narrow hips, it rippled
out in a short “frisk.” Beneath, her calico skirt, and bramble-scratched
brown legs.
Warmed with triumph, she flew downstairs. Her mother and a neighbor were
sitting in the glow of the peat fire. She tried to meet them with
assurance, but, at sight of their amazed faces, misgiving clutched her.
She pivoted before the mirror.
“Holy hour!” cried her mother. “What sausage-skin is that you’ve got
into?” Then, as comprehension grew: “Glory b’ t’ God, Ellen! ’tis the
remains of the fine new coat I’m after buying her, large enough to last
her the next five years!”
“’Twas too large!” the child whimpered. “A gander I looked in it!” Then,
cajolingly, “I’m but after taking it in a bit, ma. ’Twill do grand now,
and maybe I’ll not be getting much fatter. Look at the fit of it, just!”
“Fit! God save the mark!” cried her mother.
“Is the child after making that jacket herself?” asked the neighbor.
“I am,” Margaret spoke up, defiantly. “I cut it and shaped it and put it
together. It has even a frisk to the tail.”
“Maggie,” said the neighbor to Margaret’s mother. “’Tis as good a piece
o’ work for a child of her years as ever I see. You ought not to be
faulting her, she’s done that well. And,” bursting into irrepressible
laughter, “it’s herself will have to be wearing it, woman dear! All she
needs now is a horse and a side-saddle to be an equeestrieen!”
So the wanton destruction of the good red coat--in that house where good
coats were sadly infrequent--ended with a laugh after all. How long she
wore that tight jacket, and how grand she felt in it, let the other
children laugh as they would!
What joy the old woman took in this incident! With its fullness of
detail, it achieved a delicious suggestion of permanence, in contrast to
the illusiveness of other isolated moments. Margaret O’Brien _saw_ all
these other figures, but she really _was_ the child with the red coat.
In the long years between, she had fashioned many fine dresses--gowned
gay girls for their conquests and robed fair brides for the altar. Of
all these, nothing now remained; but she could feel the good stuff of
the red kersey under her little needle-scratched fingers, and see the
glow of its rich color against her wind-kissed brown cheek.
“To the life!” she exclaimed aloud, exultantly. “To the very life!”
“What life, Aunt Margaret?” asked Anna, with gentle solicitude. “Is it
afraid of the end you are, darling?”
“No, no, asthore. I’ve resigned myself long since, though ’twas bitter
knowledge at the outset. Well, well, God is good and we can’t live
forever.”
Her eyes, opening to the two flaring patent gas-burners, winked as if
she had dwelt long in a milder light. “What’s all this glare about?” she
asked playfully. “I guess the chandler’s wife is dead. Snuff out the
whole of them staring candles, let you. ’Tis daylight yet; just the time
o’ day I always did like the best.”
Anna obeyed and sat down beside the bed in the soft spring dusk. A
little wind crept in under the floating white curtains, bringing with it
the sweetness of new grass and pear-blossoms from the trim yard. It
seemed an interval set apart from the hurrying hours of the busy day for
rest and thought and confidences--an open moment. The old woman must
have felt its invitation, for she turned her head and held out a shy
hand to her niece.
“Anna, my girl, you imagine ’tis the full o’ the moon with me, I’m
thinking. But, no, never woman was more in her right mind than I. Do you
want I should be telling you what I’ve been hatching these many long
days and nights? ’Twill be a good laugh for you, I’ll go bail.”
And, as best she could, she gave the trend of her imaginings. Anna did
not laugh, however. Instead, with the ever-ready sympathy and
comprehension of the Celt, she showed brimming eyes. “’Tis a thought
I’ve often myself, let me tell you,” she admitted. “Of all the little
girls that were me, and now can be living no longer.”
“You’ve said it!” cried the old woman, delighted at her unexpected
responsiveness. “Only with me, ’tis fair pit’yus. There’s all those poor
dear lasses there’s nobody but me left to remember, and soon there’ll
not be even that. Sometimes they seem to be pleading just not to be
forgotten, so I have to be keeping them alive in my head. I’m
succeeding, too, and, if you’ll believe me, ’tis them little whips seem
to be the real ones, and the live children here the shadders.” Her voice
choked with sudden tears. “They’re all the children ever I had. My
grief! that I’ll have to be leaving them! They’ll die now, for no man
lives who can remember them any more.”
Anna’s beauty, already fading with the cares of house and children,
seemed to put on all its former fresh charm. She leaned forward with
girlish eagerness. “Auntie Margaret,” she breathed, with new tenderness,
“there’s many a day left you yet. I’ll be sitting here aside of you
every evening at twilight just, and you can be showing me the lasses you
have in mind. Many’s the time my mother told me of the old place, and I
can remember it well enough myself, though I was the youngest of the
lot. So you can be filling it with all of our people,--Mary and
Margaret, John, Martin and Esther, Uncle Sheamus and the rest. I’ll see
them just as clear as yourself, for I’ve a place in my head where
pictures come as thick and sharp as stars on a frosty night, when I get
thinking. Then, with me ever calling them up, they’ll be dancing and
stravaging about till doomsday.”
So the old woman had her heart’s desire. She recreated her earlier
selves and passed them on, happy in the thought that she was saving them
from oblivion. “Do you mind that bold lass clouting her pet bull, now?”
she would ask, with delight, speaking more and more as if of a third
person. “And that other hussy that’s after making a ganzy out of her
good coat? I’d admire to have the leathering of that one.”
Still the old woman lingered, a good month beyond her allotted time. As
spring ripened, the days grew long. In the slow-fading twilights, the
two women set their stage, gave cues for entrances and exits. Over the
white counterpane danced the joyous figures, so radiant, so incredibly
young, the whole cycle of a woman’s girlhood. Grown familiar now, they
came of their own accord, soothing her hours of pain with their laughing
beauty, or, suddenly contemplative, assisting with seemly decorum at her
devotional ecstasies.
“A saintly woman,” the young priest told Anna on one of the last days.
“She will make a holy end. Her meditations must be beautiful, for she
has the true light of Heaven on her face. She looks as if she heard
already the choiring of the angels.”
And Anna, respectfully agreeing, kept her counsel. He was a good and
sympathetic man and a priest of God, but, American-born, he was, like
her stolid, kindly husband, outside the magic circle of comprehension.
“He sees nothing, poor man,” she thought, indulgently. “But he does mean
well.” So she set her husband to “mind” the young ones, and, easily
doffing the sordid preoccupations of every day, slipped back into the
enchanted ring.